Seeing a satire of Oedipus Rex isn’t a typical law school assignment — especially when the production features an Elvis impersonator in the title role and sets the tragedy to the King of Rock and Roll’s greatest hits.

But UCLA School of Law’s Theater and Law seminar trades cold calls for curtain calls as students crisscross the city, from Malibu museum lawns to Eastside black box theaters, seeing plays that probe legal and social issues, which they discuss over shared meals. The course is part of UCLA Law’s Perspectives on Law and Lawyering series, one-unit, pass/no-pass seminars offering unusual ways to explore the law. Other seminars draw on graphic novels, films, and science fiction to get students thinking differently.

Leveraging live performance and encouraging conversation, the theater course reflects the creativity, collaborative spirit, and intellectual curiosity of both UCLA Law and Los Angeles.

Ambika Nuggihalli ’26 enrolled in the class for the opportunity to study law and get more connected to culture before graduating and beginning their professional life. “I thought this would be a good way to expose myself to more theaters and more companies that do art around the city,” they say. “It’s been a very fruitful experience.”

Attending the opening night of the Troubadour Theater Company’s Oedipus the King, Mamma!, performed outdoors at the Getty Villa, proved especially instructive as the troupe improvised, involved the audience, and adjusted in real time when a line didn’t land.

“It was a reminder that when you’re making an opening statement, or doing a cross-examination, you have what you prepared and what you think you want to do, but in the moment, things might change,” they say. “Maybe you’ll notice, ‘Oh, the jurors think this is weird.’ You can comment on that, you can interact with that moment, and it builds trust.”

The course was developed by Professor Andrew Verstein, a corporate law scholar who majored in philosophy during his undergraduate years, spent his spare time in theaters, and carries a passion for performance that has remained unabated ever since.

“I’m giving students what I was grateful for in college: access to the humanities as a different way of knowing and coming together,” says Verstein, who also serves as the law school’s vice dean for curricular and academic affairs and as the faculty co-director of the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy. He hosts class discussions on Sundays at his home, serving dishes from countries like Laos and Indonesia to introduce students to some of the city’s diverse food choices.

Verstein says live performances offer an immersive – and entertaining – way to build empathy, confront difficult issues, and connect with abstract concepts. He notes that theater forces students to engage with characters whose actions or views they may find objectionable and to grapple with understanding their perspectives.

The Oedipus-inspired musical kicked off a curated 2025–26 season designed to explore legal and social issues through performance. Students moved from the comedy of Oedipus the King, Mamma! to the raw, personal storytelling of Guac, Manuel Oliver’s one-man show at the Kirk Douglas Theater honoring his son Joaquin, a victim of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, while calling for action against gun violence. At UCLA’s MacGowan Little Theater, Birdie, created and performed by Agrupación Señor Serrano, used 2,000 miniature animals, scale models, and live video to explore immigration and wealth inequality. They also saw Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys at the Geffen Playhouse, dramatizing race, power, and friendship in apartheid-era South Africa. Tickets to all shows are subsidized by the law school to ensure every student can experience them.

Previous years’ seminars featured Immigrants at the State, a long-running play produced by the Actor’s Gang Prison Project and written and performed by formerly incarcerated individuals; Fatherland, by Stephen Sachs, a verbatim dramatization of the trial of a January 6 defendant who was reported to the FBI by his son; and The Lehman Trilogy, by Stefano Massini, a Tony-winning production that explored the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers.

“If you think you understand the mortgage crisis of 2007 because you read the House report on it, it’s very different to see a play about the people who are affected,” says Verstein of The Lehman Trilogy. “My students loved it. They would not have loved reading the underlying materials.”

Chloe Horner ’27, who acted in musicals throughout high school and minored in theater in college, says Verstein encourages students to consider how the shows affect them personally and fit into a broader social context. “He’s really interested in why we are watching this today, why it is situated in this time, what it means for what we're experiencing in our lives, and how that relates to our lives,” she says.

Drawing on theater’s ability to build worlds with their own rules, Verstein asks students to consider how lawyers and judges similarly shape meaning in the courtroom, where persuasion, narrative, and performance are central. He also encourages them to examine the structure and techniques of the plays, including Greek-style choruses who have appeared in several productions. “The chorus would speak the moralizing views of the community, and we the audience would engage with that,” Verstein says. “Do we agree with the chorus? We had great discussions about that.”

Verstein’s theater experience informs his role as an educator. “To be an actor is to be an interpreter. You try to give a faithful, persuasive, and personal version of a text you didn’t write. It may be a text that you disagree with,” he says. “The work of finding what is interesting and motivating and bringing it to someone else, that’s an actor. That’s a teacher.”

Horner says the seminar has created connections she hadn’t previously considered. “Part of the job of theater is interacting with law, showing us what it means and how it affects our lives, helping us understand, wrap our minds around, and advocate for or against,” she says. This class has definitely brought that to life for me.”